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Hack your Barton XP

This link belongs in the "breath new life into your MPX motherboard" category.

More than a year ago, we reported a hack which you can apply to current Athlon XP processors to enable them to operate as Athlon MP processors. The hack was fairly simple and it involved connecting a certain trace on the Athlon XP processor to allow motherboards to recognize them as an Athlon MP. The trace has been cut in the factory so it's just a matter of connecting them via soldering (if you're brave enough), or just putting conductive paint on them.

After our first article, a lot of emails came pouring in and most users were asking if the hack could be achieved with a Thoroughbred core since our initial article was based on the Palomino core. Well, of course it would and we'll be showing some results with a dual Thoroughbred-B core in the later pages. What we've done here is taking another step further with the Barton core. What's interesting with the Barton is that it's now featuring a huge 512KB L2 cache running at full speed. Get a pair of that running in SMP mode, and you'll get a pretty decent workstation-class system going at a really affordable price.

Comment

sAvAgE69
Unregistered

#22957 Posted on: 05/14/2003 05:57 PM
Thanks for the great read there Hooz , Even though I wont attempt it, I can definately see the possibilites of such a mod. Those numbers look good. hmmm now since this can be done with the 2800+, I wonder if the same steps apply with a 3200+ (400 FSB) or is that pushing it? since from what it looks like, they are just playing around with the multipliers.

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cmcquistion
IT Director

Posts: 201
Joined: 2002-10-08

#22958 Posted on: 05/14/2003 08:08 PM
This is an OLD story. People have been doing this mod for at least 2 and 1/2 months and have been talking about it for at least six months.

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Hooz
Administrator

Posts: 2388
Joined: 2000-03-29

#22961 Posted on: 05/15/2003 01:24 AM
It just showed up in the news email yesterday. I apologize to all the l337 h4x0rz who have been doing it for months... Everyone else, please ignore the link. It's worthless "old news".
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spikegifted
I do what?

Posts: 6131
Joined: 2000-07-24

#22962 Posted on: 05/15/2003 03:38 AM
Very interesting read. Unfortunately, the moded 'Barton MP' only showed marginal improvement over the T'bred MP... I guess the MPX platform really needs DDR333 or higher to take it to a higher level of performance...spikegifted.net
"At the very beginning of the 19th century chemists generally thought that compounds from living organisms were too complicated in structure to be capable of artificial synthesis from non-living things, and that a 'vital force' or vitalism conferred the characteristics of living beings on this form of matter." Well, how wrong were they? So much for dogma...

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peteb
solittletimesomuchtodo

Posts: 330
Joined: 2001-12-06

#22963 Posted on: 05/15/2003 10:16 AM
I looked at the numbers and decided not so attractive. The performance gains are not astronomical, and the cost doesn't help so much either. The bang for a buck point on my personal chart show MP2400 as the best buy at around $150 each. Flipping over to see what $150 could buy you, you only get to XP2600 - a marginal gain for a risky implimentation.

Conversely you could go to the XP2400 and save $110 on the pair, but against total system cost, this would seem still to be lacking real incentive. Sure you could spend $420+ on a pair of XP2800s and hope they work (since the site claimed difficulties with boards unspecified other than the MSI) the that is a pretty big gamble if you ask me....

I'd have thought at this stage the game was to get the high clocking XP1700 Tbreds and clock them up with multipliers (possibly after unlocking and checking potential on a single cpu rig). $45/pop here to get a potential SMP of 2400+ (or around 2Ghz, whatever that is in Athlon terms now). That would seem to be where the real budget (i.e. corner cutting) game is.

I use XP1700's in my rig, running at 1800 through FSB and they were in the Palomino days of SMP unlocked packages, so no mod required (luckily). Needless to say they were something like 3x the cost of today's faster capable (usually) Tbred B 1700s.

As with all things overclocking, no solution is guarenteed to work, and I'm sure many will have different opinions.

If I choose to extend the life and upgrade my MPX rig (and frankly it is still incredibly fast and more than capable for what I need it to do, I will probably wait another year when the real 512kb MP2800s are $100-$150 a pop (my forecast, based on my instinct).

Either that, or the economy picks up and I cream whatever is king of the hill at that point in time, Intel, AMD, Xeon, Opteron etc. :rolleyes:Lian-Li PC-76|Tyan S2466N|2xXP1700|2GB Reg ECC|Enermax651/301 Dual PSU|5x36ES Raid5 ICP Vortex GDT8623RZ|3Ware 7500-8|4xWD1000JB Raid5, 2xMaxtor80GB Raid0|SB Audigy|WinXPSP1|More PCs

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older today
Registered User

Posts: 89
Joined: 2002-07-31

#22964 Posted on: 05/16/2003 08:26 PM
I sent it in because things seem to be slow, it was a new review of an old hack, ppl still ask about it in the forums
Sometimes lonesome.... never miserable.